Stuck in limbo. That’s what happened to me at the end of 2018 and the reason why my usual yearend blog post didn’t arrive. if you thought the poem “Miss You (New Year’s Eve)” was it, you were wrong. Spending Christmas and the New Year in the United Arab Emirates with my family took me out of the traditional December routine I got accustomed to, which comprised of enduring the dreaded Christmas rush of buying presents, attending last-minute parties, anticipating the Christmas eve dinner (there must be pasta!), and the awkward silence of the post-Christmas cool down. Instead, I was exploring a country I’d never been to where Christmas was not much of a big deal and familiar faces were few to none. That feeling of a year ending and a new one starting was too far from my grasp there. Out of my element, I could not reconnect with the events that happened to me the previous year. Though I did try, the introspective blog summarising my 2018 didn’t come to fruition.
Returning to my home country after the first week of 2019 brought back the familiar scenery and routines that allowed me to reconcile with memories of the previous year. Unlike the years prior, I can’t pinpoint any single theme or label for the clusterfuck year of 2018. The closest to a theme or a label I can give it to is being some sort of divine teacher who handed me down lessons I already knew or heard from somewhere else. We don’t really get to understand some life lessons, despite us being aware of them, until they have been reaffirmed to us through some firsthand experience. Below are 10 random life lessons reaffirmed to mr last 2018.
1. Death comes when we least expect it.
Death is a huge theme of most of my written work. I’m curiously fascinated by it. It’s some space or entity in the universe I know I’ll never get to until I perish from this Earth yet at the same time, in whatever delusional way I can, I am drawn to exploring it. What was reaffirmed to me last year was that death comes when we least expect it. Like it did when one midnight I saw sprawled on the street in front of our house my cat Cosmog, a pool of blood under his body and his face disfigured by the vehicle that ran him over and killed him, when he was just chilling with me in my bed an hour ago. It’s one of those moments when I wished somebody would pinch me and wake me up from what I hoped was only a dream.
2. There’s no preparing for tragedy.
It would not be a tragedy if one can prepare for it, right? Cosmog’s untimely death already bruised my confidence in being a pet owner but little did I know of what was to come. One death was not enough so came many more. In a span of one week, a few of my cats would follow Cosmog into the other side. First to leave was the newborn Felix, too weak to continue on living. Second was my grey tabby iTunes, who died all of a sudden. The rest followed suit: Shuri (iTunes’ jet-black sister), Felix’s littermate Twinnie and Little Nebby, my adopted Numel, Felix’s last littermate Jirachi, and Spotify who put up a good fight against a mysterious disease for days before eventually succumbing, dying right in front of my very eyes. The tragedy was capped by the death of my beloved calico Nebby, who shared a bed with me, along with her second litter, each tiny one I didn’t even get a chance to name. As a pet owner, I never felt so helpless, guilty, and disappointed, their tragic deaths putting a permanent worry stamp on my heart that can never be erased.
3. FOMO is real.
The acronym for the concept known as “Fear of Missing Out”, FOMO is very real. Since becoming active once more on Twitter on 2017, pushed there by the aftermath of the 2016 Presidential election of my country Philippines, I felt like I was participating in a homecoming. At first it was fun, discovering new people and unforeseen changes on a place you used to stay at. Over time, one of social media’s evils showed its ugly face again. I got sucked into the unlimited vortex of the Internet: news, gossip, fads, and even silly dramas, all demanding I give them my utmost attention and distracting me from my important goals. Enslaved by FOMO, my writing suffered: inconsistent blog posting, very little movement for my second novel, and even random side projects that amounted to nothing. My online drabble series Death’s Last Days with the Dying was good news though that could not overweigh my writing losses.
4. Charlatans exist.
The information age, while advantageous and beneficial for us, has its downsides. Since the Internet ocean is filled with too much channels and content, fake news to faux thought leaders to poseurs to mind-numbing circus have become aplenty. Keen observation will tell you who are merely just talkers and who are the doers (and even the thiefs). Some are just in it for attention without having done the real work to merit credibility. It’s important to not get sucked into their facade and identify the quacks who really have nothing to say.
5. Inner security can arm you from haters.
Last year, some stupid, irrational people with untreated insecurity and untamed inner demons attempted to besmirch me on Twitter for not sharing their political views completely. If one wants to know how adults display immaturity online, that’s one example. At the receiving end of demonising and illogical, out-of-thin-air accusations from morons masquerading as godsend saviours of the world, the drama reaffirmed how far I’ve come in terms of self-growth and mental reprogramming. If it happened to me many years ago, I’d probably quit Twitter or do some victimhood shit but I didn’t. I was able to shrug off their pettiness right away because any sane person would know what they were throwing at me were lies and anyone, let alone online strangers, quick to believe what they read about me have no place in my life.
6. There’s no reasoning with black-and-white people.
You’re better off talking to a wall than them. An unexpected drama in my day job happened involving quite a few people due to hearsay, gossip, assassination of reputation, victim-playing, and social media circus, causing even the longest friendships to die. But there’s no making sense to black-and-white people. Once any bad story about someone reaches their ears, regardless of the credibility of the story, they pass judgment easily. It is sad how people are quick to forget all the good somebody did and paint somebody as the devil without realising that humans are complex creatures driven to actions by any or a combination of motive, environment, traits, and circumstance. It is a grey world we live in.
7. True friendships are rare (and sometimes may not be in the form you expect.)
The death of friendships I witnessed last year helped me appreciate all my friendships that have survived the years. Some of them I didn’t expect to make it past the alleged 7-year test but I’m glad they did. Some of them, I liked from the start and I’m happy to still have today. The previous lesson shone light that just because a friendship is not a shiny kind that one can show off to the world, it doesn’t mean they are not worth anything. My best memories of genuine friendships are those dark times when you and your fellow’s bond become more solidified. We appear to have many friends in today’s interconnected world but how many of them are real?
8. A happy life isn’t always on display.
Call it getting old or whatever you want but the more I find contentment in my real life the less I have the energy to share it. I’m not saying sharing your life on social media for public consumption is wrong. However, some appear to overdo it complete with powerful captions and hashtags of jubilance, which sometimes prompts you to think, “Is all this an attempt to feign a ‘happy life’?” Last year, I had lots of good and happy events, I missed sharing online because I was too busy enjoying them so much. We don’t need the likes and favourites of online strangers to validate that we are living a good and happy life.
9. A non-family man can become a family man.
Not in a traditional sense, of course, and I’m speaking from experience. Since I’m not a family person, in a traditional sense (again), I never put family on a pedestal. Growing up in a non-verbally expressive family, I was a stranger to the happy family image they often portray on media. Because of that, I often envied and resented families with that kind of image. As a child to a teenager to a young adult, I coped with the absence of that kind of entity in my life by treating it as something I had no need for and would never, ever experience. Yes, I still think that family does not have to mean blood. I have friends who are like family to me too. But talking about the family as a unit of blood-related people, I’ve warmed up to the idea of me becoming a family person after my vacation in UAE at the end of last year. It must be the ambiance of Abu Dhabi or the hilarity caused my niece. Nah. I think it’s caused by something more than that.
10. Time is a loan.
Someday we will grow old and we will miss all the wasted time we should’ve spent with our loved-ones. As my family and I visited the Louvre, the Grand Mosque, and even Warner Bros World last December, I saw my parents for what they are now, growing old as each year go by with more wrinkles and white hair to come, and felt appreciation that we were going on tour together. I realised it’s something not everybody get to experience in their lifetime and I was blessed to do so. I also looked at my niece and thought one day she’d grow too and wouldn’t be the cute toddler she is anymore. Her innocence reminded me that I was once an innocent toddler too, ignorant and free from the worries, troubles, and heartaches of the world. But these weren’t reasons to be sad knowing that time will continue to pass and we can’t do anything about it. It’s a reason to be more appreciative of the people in our lives now because we never know when time will take them away.
2018, you were one hell of a teacher.
What about you? What lessons were reaffirmed to you last year?
This was originally published on January 12, 2019 on my old website as one of my end-of-year introspective posts.
Photo by Pavlo Luchkovski.
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